How the NFL Lost to Trump

Donald Trump isn't exactly on a winning streak, but he is beating the NFL in a rout.

A day after fearless ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith pronounced Trump the victor in the national anthem controversy, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell confirmed the verdict with a memo sounding what is sure to be a messy, divisive retreat by the league.

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“Like many of our fans,” Goodell wrote, “we believe that everyone should stand for the National Anthem.” Now he tells us.

The climbdown comes only weeks after a clueless bout of self-congratulation by the NFL and the media over widespread protests during the anthem. Wasn't it marvelous that the owners and players were so united? Hadn't Donald Trump badly overplayed his hand? Weren’t we possibly on the cusp of a glorious era of activism in sports?

NFL executives and supporters of the protests instead should have been wondering, What the hell is the end game?

Donald Trump doesn't play three-dimensional chess, as his supporters insist. Sometimes, even the rules of checkers seem to elude him. But he has an instinctive cunning and a grasp of a nationalistic cultural politics that shouldn't be underestimated by his opponents, even though it almost always is.

Putting aside whether a president should be waging war on a sports league at all, Trump’s intervention in the kneeling issue was needlessly inflammatory. He shouldn't have called protesting players “sons of bitches” and mused about firing them—there’s no reason for the president of the United States to sound like the loudest guy down at the end of the bar.

The very outrageousness of Trump’s riff, though, served his purposes. This use of controversy-generating exaggeration is one of his distinctive contributions to our politics.

Since no NFL players were going to be fired, the fundamental issue was never going to be Trump’s lurid overstatement. Instead, the overstatement acted as a neon advertisement for his commonsensical underlying point, namely that players should stand during the national anthem. And it baited the NFL into fighting him on indefensible ground.

There were all sorts of unobjectionable means available for players to take a stand of defiance toward Trump, but they allowed themselves to, in effect, get double-dared into disrespecting the flag.

The perils here should have been obvious. The flag is one of our most potent national symbols. The U.S. Code sets out how it should be treated. It drapes the coffins of fallen warriors. It flies at half-staff to mark national tragedies and the loss of the country’s heroes. People can get extremely emotional seeing it displayed the wrong way or touching the ground.

David Frum, one of the most incisive and unrelenting anti-Trump voices in the country, wrote a piece for the Atlantic at the outset of the controversy, urging players not to cede the flag to Trump. They went right ahead and ceded the flag to Trump. Why?

It was, in part, a classic bubble phenomenon. Sports journalists are, if anything, more left than political journalists. They were excited about being at the center of a national political debate and sticking it to Trump. Much of the media piled right behind them. On CNN and MSNBC for days after Trump’s initial riff it was rare to hear a commentator say a discouraging word about the protests, let alone warn that the NFL was stumbling into Trump’s political kill box.

It is true that, after Trump got involved, the polling on the protests began to show the public more evenly divided. If you're Donald Trump and at 40 percent or below in the polls, though, a 50/50 issue works for you. If you are the NFL and hope to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, a 50/50 issue is a disaster for you.

The NFL misunderstood its own nature. It's not just that it is a game that should be a respite from political and social contention; as a quasi-national festival, it should be identified with a certain baseline of patriotism (the national anthem, the enormous American flags on the field before games, the military flyovers, etc.). Colin Kaepernick cracked this image and Donald Trump drove a wedge through it.

It is stunning to step back and consider that Trump took on the most popular sport in the country—and what not too long ago would have been considered an unassailable institution—and beat it into submission, with one pungent line at a rally and a bunch of tweets. By last weekend, getting Vice President Mike Pence to walk out of a 49ers-Colts game was only making the rubble bounce.

It is much too early to know what the 2020 landscape will look like, but if Trump wins again it will surely have something to do with a dynamic like the one that played out with the NFL. Trump will cause an unthinking over-reaction by Democrats on a culture issue or issues, and the party will be wrong-footed by the insularity of its own political and media ecosystem.

What most repulses Democrats about Trump, his status as a nationalistic culture warrior, is what they most need to take heed of. If Hillary Clinton during the campaign had said, politely, that Colin Kaepernick should stand during the anthem, it might have been enough of a signal of old-school patriotism to working-class voters to put her over the top. Three more years of Trump will presumably make it even harder for the next Democratic nominee to tack to the center on a few cultural hot buttons.